MoonPay Agrees to Buy North Capital and Its SEC-Registered Securities Brokerage

MoonPay built its business moving money between bank accounts and crypto wallets for more than 35 million customers. On Wednesday, the crypto payments company agreed to buy a firm that brokers securities and runs a venue for trading them.

MoonPay signed a definitive merger agreement for North Capital Investment Technology, a Utah company whose platform handles capital raising, custody and secondary trading for private securities, including tokenized ones. Once the deal closes, North Capital will operate as a wholly owned MoonPay subsidiary.

Neither company disclosed a price. MoonPay is paying more than $60 million, entirely in stock, a person familiar with the deal told Fortune.

North Capital’s regulated units include two SEC-registered broker-dealers, a transfer agent, an investment adviser and the PPEX alternative trading system. PPEX lists more than 1,250 approved assets for secondary trading, and North Capital’s platform has handled over $8.7 billion in transactions across new issues and secondary trades, according to the release.

Transfer agents keep the official record of who owns a company’s shares. The SEC proposed on Sept. 1 to let them keep that record on a blockchain.

The registrations were a key factor in the deal, the person told Fortune.

“At MoonPay, we’re building the regulatory foundation to support mass adoption of tokenized real-world assets,” founder and CEO Ivan Soto-Wright said in the release. “The OS for value movement has to run every asset, securities included,” he later posted on X.

North Capital founder and CEO James P. Dowd said in the release that North Capital sees “a compelling opportunity to combine our teams and capabilities while continuing to support the clients and partners who have helped build North Capital.”

North Capital had already linked its venue to another platform for tokenized securities. In January, it and tokenization firm tZERO announced Agora, a network that lets qualified subscribers of one alternative trading system reach securities listed on another, starting with PPEX and tZERO’s own venue. The two firms routed their first order through it earlier this year, tZERO said on Wednesday.

For MoonPay, it is the latest in a string of acquisitions dating to January 2025. In May, it bought DFlow, a Solana trading infrastructure provider. Separately, in August, MoonPay let Cash App users spend their balances at its crypto checkout.

The deal still requires regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. The companies did not give an expected closing date.

Related Listen: Why the SEC Paused on Its Innovation Exemption for Tokenization: Bits + Bips

{"@context":"http:\/\/schema.org\/","@id":"https:\/\/unchainedcrypto.com\/moonpay-agrees-to-buy-north-capital-and-its-sec-registered-securities-brokerage\/#arve-youtube-kkec65jybjw","@type":"VideoObject","embedURL":"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/KKec65JyBjw?feature=oembed&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&autohide=1&playsinline=1&autoplay=0"}

The post MoonPay Agrees to Buy North Capital and Its SEC-Registered Securities Brokerage appeared first on Unchained.